snubfighters and the threat they posed to capital ships. All of 250 meters
long, the boxy ships were studded with twenty gunnery towers, each one sporting
a Seinar Fleet System Quad laser array. With its speed, which was exceptional
for a big ship, and those weapons, the Lancer-class ships were rancors amid a
nerf herd. While the Eridain's turbolasers could have driven it off, the
Carrack-class cruiser outgunned the blockade runner, leaving the Lancer free to
pounce on the fighters.
The X-wings were fast enough to elude the Lancer, but there was no way the
Y-wings could outrun it or fight it. The Lancer's guns made it the equivalent of
eighty TIEs. Wedge glanced at his fuel monitor. He didn't have enough fuel
remaining for a long fight with the Lancer and the run home. / don't have enough
fuel to let the Eridain run for help. The best chance the Y-wings had was for
the X-wings to engage the Lancer while they ran.
Before he could reply to Tycho's request for orders, General Salm's voice came
over the comm. "Rogue Leader, screen Warden and Guardian squadrons and get them
out of there. Champion will buy you the time."
"Negative, General. Champion will die that way, Rogue may die if we hit the
Lancer and you break out."
"I'm making this an order, Antilles."
"Rogue Squadron takes its orders from Admiral Ackbar, General."
"Rogue Leader, this is Nine."
"Not now, Nine."
"Commander, I know how we can get the Lancer. Worst case, we lose one ship."
"What is he babbling about?"
"Easy, General. Go ahead, Nine."
"Ships have to close to two and a half klicks to get a firing solution for a
proton torpedo. The Y-wing getting that close to the Lancer will be vaped. An
X-wing can get in and send targeting data to the Y-wings, increasing the range
for their solution. Same thing Captain Celchu did in the Forbidden at Chorax.
The proton torps will home for thirty seconds, which means they can hit a target
at just over fourteen and a half klicks. That will keep them safe from the
Lancer."
Wedge frowned as he worked through Corran's plan. A weaving X-wing might be able
to get in close to the Lancer.
General Salm saw the flaw in the plan at the same time Wedge did. "A weaving
X-wing won't be able to get a targeting lock on the Lancer, Antilles. This is
nonsense."
Corran's voice came back strong. "The X-wing doesn't need to get a targeting
lock, he just needs to get in close. The Y-wings will be targeting the X-wing's
homing beacon. Time it right, put the Lancer between the missiles and the
X-wing, and you can scratch one Lancer."
"That just might work." Wedge pulled back on the X-wing's stick and started up
toward space and the waiting Imperial ships. "I'll make the run."
"Negative, Antilles."
"General ..."
"Rogue Leader, this is Nine, outbound. Release Warden Squadron to me."
Salm's fury sizzled over the comm. "Under no circumstances! Stop now, Rogue
Nine."
"Release the squadron to me. I'm outbound and I'm going to play tag with that
Lancer.,"
"This is treason, Nine." Salm's voice cracked with anger. "I'll have you shot."
"As long as it's Warden Squadron that's doing it, I don't mind a bit. Nine out."
"Antilles, do something!"
"He's got the altitude, General." And the attitude. "Release the squadron to
him." Wedge let a deep breath out. "Then form Champion up on me, just in case
his run doesn't do the trick."
Corran keyed his comm. "Okay, Wardens, this is how we become heroes. Link your
torpedoes so you'll be shooting two. You'll shoot them on my mark. Timing is
critical herego too early and you won't hit anything. Go too late and I'm ...
look, just don't go too late. Ten, I need you to match their speed and don't let
them get any closer than eight and a half klicks from me. And not much farther
either. My homing beacon will be on 312.43. Use that as the frequency for the
target lock on the torpedoes."
"Control, Nine here. Be prepared to scatter the Wardens with evasive maneuver
plots in case the Lancer gets aggressive once the torpedoes are away."
"On it, Nine. Good luck."
Corran's hand strayed to the medallion he wore. "Thanks, Control. Nine out."
"Okay, Whistler, we have our work cut out for us." The pilot hit switches that
pumped the full output of the fusion engine into propulsion. He ran all shield
power to the forward shields. "I'm going to be trying to weave in at that
monster. I want you to route my stick commands through a randomizer
that adds or subtracts portions of five degrees in all dimensions from my
commands. Don't let the Lancer get out of a twenty-degree cone of my nose, but
in that cone I want to be jumping around, got it?"
The droid replied with a sharp, affirmative whistle.
"And at the Lancer, I want to invert and pull a tight loop scraping right over
the top of its hull and down the other side. We should be going away at ninety
degrees to our current line and back toward Vladet's atmosphere." Corran sighed.
"If we make it that far."
Whistler squawked reprovingly.
"Sorry to get you into this." Corran punched the console button that enabled the
droid's ejection system. "Maybe your next pilot won't be so stupid."
The green light above the button went out.
Corran hit the button again. "And maybe your next ship won't have shorts."
The light died again.
The pilot turned and looked back at the droid. "You got a death wish?"
Whistler brayed derisively at him.
"I am not looking at taking all the glory for myself." Corran swallowed past
the lump in his throat. "Thanks for hanging in. My father died alone. Doing that
doesn't recommend itself."
The droid gave him a scolding whoop.
"Okay, you do your part and I'll make sure we don't die." Corran looked at his
scanner. Sensors put him eighteen klicks out from the Lancer. "Whistler, check
my math. At full power I'll do six klicks in the time it takes the missiles to
catch me. That means they have to shoot when I hit the six klick mark. They have
to be inside fifteen klicks from the Lancer. Looks like we're all lined up and
ready to go."
The droid chirped triumphantly and a countdown clock started in the upper
corner of the sensor display. "Nine to Wardens, forty, four-oh, seconds to
launch."
"Whistler, cut in the randomizer when I hit two and a half klicks from the
target." The Lancer's weaponry, because it was taken from TIE bombers, suffered
the same range limitations as the fighters. "Also map how the towers are working
and send that data back to Control and Rogue Leader. If the Lancer has any weak
points, any guns that aren't shooting well, they need to know."
The timer counted down to ten seconds. Corran rubbed his medallion one more
time, then settled his right hand on the stick and smiled. "Here goes Rogue
Nine, following the unit's tradition of accepting suicide missions with a
smile. Wardens, on my mark. Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Mark. Launch
torpedoes!"
The comm came alive with
fire reports. Corran couldn't make sense of the babble,
but as the clash of voices died, he did hear "Warden Three, torpedoes away."
He glanced at the timer, which had started scrolling off seconds until impact.
Two seconds late. Probably not a problem. "Whistler, you want to kill the volume
on the missile lock warning siren? I am aware they're incoming."
* The background noise in the cockpit died. He watched the seconds slowly count
down. It seemed to take forever for him to pass from the launch point to halfway
in on the Lancer. As his ship streaked in he could see strings of green laser
bolts begin to stretch out toward him. They began to curve and curl as the
gunners tried to track his ship. The closing speed made all of their initial
shots go long.
Twelve and one-quarter seconds from impact, Whistler brought the randomizing
program into play and Corran felt the stick begin to twitch. A tiny spark of
fear ran through him as he imagined he had lost control of the ship. In its wake
he found a calm that felt all too familiar from the last night on Talasea. Well,
I didn't die then. Maybe, just maybe . . .
Easing the stick back and to the left he tossed the X-wing into the weave. Wave
after seemingly solid wave of green laser energy lashed out from the Lancer, yet
his snubfighter sliced through the troughs and curled around the crests,
flirting with their deadly caresses. Light flashed against his shields,
partially blinding him, but those glancing hits neither slowed nor deflected
him.
There was no missing his target. The Lancer-class frigateWhistler identified it
as the Ravager swelled into a hard-edged, spiky rectangle with an up-bent prow
and a bulbous engine assembly. Green backlight from the quads splashed color
over the ship's Imperial-white exterior. Corran nudged the X-wing in line, more
or less, with the ship's middle deck, then the X-wing whirled out of his
control.
In compliance with the instructions he had given Whistler before, the droid
rolled the fighter hard to starboard. The stick bashed Corran's right hand
against the side of the cockpit, but before the pain could begin to register,
the stick tore itself free of his grasp and smacked him solidly in the chest.
With the stick pinning him back in his command chair, Corran could only look up
and watch the Ravager's hull blur as it flashed past.
The torpedoes had been within half a second of catching the X-wing when it
snapped up and around the Ravager. While fully capa ble of making the same
maneuver the fighter had, because of their greater
speed, the torpedoes needed more space in which to make it. Even as they started
to correct their courses to follow Corran, they slammed into the Lancer and
detonated.
The first half-dozen explosions produced more energy than the shields could
absorb. The shields went down, leaving the frigate open to the rest of the
torpedo swarm. Blast shields buckled and transparisteel viewports evaporated as
the torpedoes detonated. Titanium hull plates went molten, flowing into
globules of metal that would harden as perfect spheres in the frozen darkness
of space. Decks ruptured and the growing fireball at the center of the ship
consumed atmosphere, equipment, and personnel with a rapacious appetite.
All but two of the torpedoes fed into the roiling plasma storm raging in the
heart of the Ravager. In bisecting the ship, the torpedoes cut all power and
control links between the bridge, in the prow, and the engines at the stern.
Automatic safeguards immediately kicked in and the engines shut down. All laser
fire from the Ravager died and the stricken ship keeled over. It began to lose a
tug-of-war with the planet below and slowly tumbled down into Rachuk's gravity
well.
Corran, in an X-wing sprinting away from the Imperial frigate, could see none of
the damage the torpedoes did to the Ravager. He stared down his sensor monitor
and smiled as the sensors reported, , line by line, the deaths of twenty-two
torpedoes that were following him.
Twenty-two? But there should have been twenty-four. He pried the stick off his
chest. "Whistler, where are those last two missiles?"
The sensor array shifted. The torpedoes had shot under the Lancer, reacquiring
his beacon when
he cleared the frigate's far side. Almost here. I have to break hard!
The stick twitched and jerked of its own accord. Horror trickled electricity
through Corran's guts. "Whistler, cut it out!"
The stick still bucked and fought against his grip. Corran realized, in one
painfully crystal-clear moment, that in having used the indefinite pronoun it in
his last command he had made a mistake equal in magnitude to still having all
shield energy in his forward arc. He started to rectify both of those errors,
but the proximity indicator reporting the location of Warden Three's torpedoes
told him his time had run out.
22
Kirtan Loot's shuttle came out of hyperspace a second before the spread of
proton torpedoes hit the Ravager. Hanging nearly ten kilometers above the
distant Lancer, all Kirtan saw was a cone of green laser light stabbing off into
space, then a brilliant light dawning at the base of the cone, illuminating the
frigate in which it burned. Subsidiary blasts surrounded the ship with fire,
then it slowly started to drift away as escape pods shot in all directions away
from it.
"What in Sith happened there?" The shuttle's pilot shook his head. "I don't
know, but I'm reading a Corellian blockade runner out there and a number of
Alliance fighters. I'm taking us in to the Expeditious now!"
The fear in the man's voice almost overwhelmed Kirtan's sense of mission. "While
you're running, Lieutenant, get me as much comm chatter captured as you can. I
want all of it. Do you have any survey probes? Launch one."
"Sensors are telling us all we need to know about the dead frigate, sir."
"Not it, you moron, launch it at the runner and the fighters." Only because he
couldn't fly the shuttle did Kirtan refrain from throttling the pilot. "If you
had lasers for brains you couldn't melt ice with them."
"Probe away." The pilot glanced back at him. "Anything else, or can I land us on
the Expeditious and get us out of here?"
"Are the fighters a serious threat to us?"
"Probably not, they're all too far away, but I don't want to chance it."
"Very well, do your docking maneuver, but keep data flow constant from that
probe."
"As you command, my lord."
Kirtan ignored the mocking tones in the man's voice and sat back to think. The
tiny rocket probe would provide little solid data. It was designed to be used to
sink into a planet's atmosphere and provide a shuttle with wind and atmospheric
data that would affect flight and landing. It also had basic communications
scanning capabilities and some visual sensors that might provide him data about
the blockade runner and the fighters.
All of that would only confirm what he knew inside already. The fighters, or
part of them at least, were from Rogue Squadron. Their need to strike back after
the raid on their base was obvious, as w
as the Rebellion's need to punish
Admiral Devlia for daring to strike at them.
Kirtan pressed his hands together, fingertip to fingertip. "Lieutenant, is there
any signal from Grand Isle?"
"Automatic warning beacons and faint homing locators from TIE wreckage."
Good, then Devlia got what he deserved.
Kirtan had assumed Rogue Squadron and the Rebellion would exact retribution for
the raid even
before he had deduced its location. This was why he had wanted a mechanical
probe to be followed by a full-scale assault. Destroying Rogue Squadron would
have hampered Rebel operations in the Rachuk sector and clearly would have
prevented the loss of the Ravager, as well as Grand Isle. If it had been done my
way Admiral Devlia would be a hero instead of just dead.
Kirtan closed his eyes and summoned up all the information he had about troop
strengths and locations in the sphere of space that surrounded Coruscant.
Corellia and Kuat both were located in the most thickly populated portion of the
galaxy and were heavily defended because of their shipyards. Their sectors had
limited Rebel activity, largely because of the Imperial presence. The Rebels,
while arrogant enough to think they could destroy the Empire, were not stupid.
Hitting the Empire where it was strong was not a good way to win the war.
Sectors like Rachuk were weak links in the perimeter, but were not the keys to
winning the galactic civil war. Industrialized warfare called for the
destruction of a force's ability to wage war. Conquering primitive worlds that
produced very little of what contributed to the war effort was not a way to do
that. The ease of delivering forces to strike at Rachuk from other Imperial
garrisons meant it would be difficult to hold, therefore he assumed the Rebels
would not try to hold it.
By leaving it in our hands we have to devote forces to holding it, further
diluting our strength.
The ideal choice for a Rebel strike would be in a sector of space where travel
was limited because of black holes, clouds of ionized gases, and other gravitic
anomalies that made hyperspace travel unpredictable and dangerous. It would
also be outside the most solidly inhabited areas of the galaxy to
minimize the amount of support the Empire could devote to it, but it wouldn't be
so far outside that same area that the Alliance, which also drew a lot of